Don’t be offended, but Gary Delaney is coming to Comedy All Stars in Horndean

Chris Broom

Gary Delaney is very certain of the type of people he wants to come to see him perform.

As he puts it in his own tour blurb: ‘Fun for people who enjoy getting offended by jokes.’

‘I think those people are idiots,’ says the stand-up of people who seem to delight in taking offence. ‘I do word-play nonsense, to me it’s quite obvious that if you’re talking about words and language I don’t really mean what I’m saying, right?

‘Some of them are going to be silly or dark – there’s no point of view in one liners.

‘If one requires me to be married and the next requires me to be single, or gay, it doesn’t matter, it’s just jokes, I’ll do whatever. But someone going through them and saying: “Gosh that’s what he believes, that’s his opinion, I’m offended,” that’s ridiculous.

‘I always try and have something to say it might be a little bit naughty, and if you get offended, aren’t you silly, but thank you for your tenner.’

Gary’s come a long way since his first paid gig writing station idents – albeit award-winning station idents – for Kerrang! Radio.

As a master of the one-liner he’s been described by BBC Online as ‘the man Jimmy Carr tries to be.’

Although many of his jokes are indeed too rude to publish in WOW247, here’s a couple of his older ones that are printable: ‘Grammar news: A man has been found guilty of overusing commas, the judge warned him to expect a very long sentence,’ or ‘Cleopatra’s Needle. Good point, well made,’ or even ‘Just been to a camouflage swingers party. We all chucked our khakis into a bowl.’

The comic was an early adopter of Twitter, and it remains stuffed full of his jokes.

If it’s funny and makes a point, great. If it makes a point instead of being funny, then shut up and write something else

Gary Delaney

‘Most of what I put up there is jokes. And more specifically it’s jokes that I’m not planning to use live.

‘In the early days of Twitter, there weren’t many people on there and there weren’t many people putting jokes up there, so I would test material on it, and if it went down well, I’d use it in the show, but as it got bigger and I got tens of thousands of followers and they’re the same people who come to the shows, I couldn’t do that because people would be like: “All right mate, I’ve seen that.”

‘I don’t boast about it too much as it looks a bit negative, as they’re the ones that haven’t made it into the show for whatever reason, and there are thousands of those!’

And we shouldn’t expect him to be going down the confessional comic route any time soon either.

‘My last Edinburgh show was called Gary Delaney 2: This Time it Isn’t Personal, making a point it’s not about me.

‘I’m not interesting. I’m a 42-year-old overweight man from The Midlands. Who wants to hear about my life? Even I don’t want to hear about my life. The only thing relevant about my life is that I’m pretty good at writing jokes and people like listening to them, so I do that a lot.

‘I’ve got very little patience with comics who stand on stage giving their opinion. I don’t care, I’m not interested, I find it really indulgent and annoying.’

With the notable exception of Matt Forde, who Gary singles out for praise in this area, he’s also not keen on comics who talk politics. As he once tweeted: ‘A comic’s views on politics are every bit as important as a butcher’s views on astronomy.’

‘I did economics at university, so I’ve got a reasonable understanding of politics and economics, but I find most comics are very ill-informed. Why are they blathering on about something they don’t understand?’

But even with his academic background in the subject matter, Gary leaves it out of his shows. For Gary, it’s all about the joke – or you’re in the wrong game.

‘I’m constantly baffled, when I go to Edinburgh and there so many shows where it’s joke, joke, joke, then it’s: And here’s my opinion, serious thing, serious thing, and a chunk of that, then back to the jokes. Who cares? Cut that bit out and you can get more jokes in.

I’m probably being a bit more militant than I intend to be on this, that’s very much my opinion on it, and I am aware there are other types of comedy, but whatever you’re saying it has to be funny.

‘If it’s funny and makes a point, great. If it makes a point instead of being funny, then shut up and write something else.’

Gary is appearing at Comedy All Stars alongside Suzi Ruffell and Paul Chowdhry with WOW247 Best Comedy Act winner James Alderson as compere.

He will also be touring his There’s Something About Gary show, which will come to the south coast at some point.